


between the words, beneath language

by feralphoenix



Category: Undertale (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Autistic Frisk, Borderline Personality Disorder, Character Study, Don't copy to another site, Hanukkah, Nonverbal Frisk, Other, Polyamory, Post-Canon, Spoilers - Undertale Pacifist Route
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-17
Updated: 2019-01-17
Packaged: 2019-10-11 13:23:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,562
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17447804
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/feralphoenix/pseuds/feralphoenix
Summary: Frisk practices breaking a bad habit with the help of a beloved hobby.





	between the words, beneath language

**Author's Note:**

> _(when you stop and look around, this life is pretty amazing_ – I want to love a person freely, including all her secrets. I want to love in this person someone she doesn’t know. I want to love outside the law: without judgment. Without imposed preference. Does that mean outside morality? No. Only this: Without fault. Without false, without true.)
> 
>  
> 
> this is a month late but it's whatever. recipe mentioned in the first scene is [this fella](https://reformjudaism.org/jewish-life/food-recipes/three-tone-latkes).
> 
> this fic has continuity with [this one](https://archiveofourown.org/works/16176800) and also [these](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13217331) [two](https://archiveofourown.org/works/9131962). maybe i'll put all of these into a series one day, but it is not this day.
> 
> there's also very vague reference to frisk having had an abusive therapist in the past, in case that sort of thing is upsetting for you.

You make grabby hands at Chara from across the room until they notice you from the corner of your eye and look up, and then you wave them over and show them your phone: _Is there anything on here that you can’t eat?_

“Potatoes, sweet potatoes, zucchini, onion…” Chara reads under their breath, trailing a fingertip down the ingredient list. “No, it looks fine to me. Are we okay on matzah mix, though?”

You give them a thumbs up. _I asked Mom to get extra and I know Dad still has a lot left over too, we’ll definitely have enough to try everything._

“Okay,” says Chara. They still look unusually wan and the dark smudges under their eyes are very bad, but they’re so much better than last year. They’re still able to eat. They’re still able to speak. They’re not willing to leave Monster Town and they don’t seem to want to go outside much, but they never like to leave town anyway. And yesterday when it finally snowed they sat in the windowsill and recorded you and Asriel making snow sculptures and the little birds that came to nibble at Asgore’s feeder. Maybe a day will eventually come when they’ll be able to handle this time of year without suffering too badly.

 _I’ll have to see if I want to use less onion than this recipe calls for though,_ you append when Chara looks at you through their hair.

“Happy experimenting,” they say, half smiling. “I don’t think you’re really capable of messing up potatoes at this point, so like, no pressure.”

 

 

You are finally going to therapy again, and for the longest time you thought Toriel must have given your new therapist an earful about what happened with your last one because all you’ve been doing for weeks is playing games. They put a sound generator on in the background and low lighting and hand you a controller and you play the 100th anniversary remake of Journey and don’t speak the whole time, or you play word puzzles, coming up with as many different solutions to a challenge as you can.

Two sessions ago you finally asked when they planned to move on to practicing skills, if it’s really okay to spend so much time easing you into getting used to them.

They were silent and looked at you for a moment, and they said then, “Frisk, we _have_ been doing skills building all this time.”

You frowned at them, and they understood your question before you even had to write it down. “From what you and your mother have told me, you’ve been put into a lot of very high-pressure situations where you needed to find the one right answer, in fear of consequences that might be very severe. It’s been encouraging you to face all kinds of situations the same way even now, because that’s what you’re used to. These kinds of games are practice to help you learn to face problems from different angles and find multiple solutions where the stakes are low and there aren’t any winners or losers.

“Because of the environment that you grew up in and the way you befriended and freed your monster friends, your first instinct might always be to want to think of things as black and white. But you can learn to stop yourself and check to make sure that you’re observing the problem from all different angles, to come up with lots of solutions.

“You’ve told me that you hope to go into politics when you’re older, and be an ambassador for the monsters. If you still want to do that when you’re grown up, this will be good practice for finding solutions then.”

Then they showed you an alternate route to solve one of the early puzzles in Journey that you’d only ever come up with similar ways to get past, and let you play with corduroy swatches while you wrote about your feelings.

You brace yourself, still, when you go to see them: You’ve spent over a year being told that your emotions are unruly and you’re just bad and toxic by nature. You’re still trying to avoid missteps, to be perfect, wishing that the player would come back and give you the answers again whenever you struggle. It’s easier to _talk_ about avoiding black and white problem solving or to accomplish it in games than it is to practice these things in real life.

But you have to, you _want_ to, learn how to do this by yourself. For yourself.

 

 

“Are you just, like… gonna keep collecting recipes until you have one for every night?” Asriel asks. He doesn’t twist his head back to look at you because the angle is too awkward, but at least with his arms under his belly he’s not going to be reaching up to scratch his horn nubs.

“Yeah,” you say, running the brush down his back. He makes a soft sound and you shiver. Of course you have to help him with this now that Chara keeps refusing out of embarrassment and Asgore is busy—Asriel sheds a _lot_ this time of year to make room for his winter coat—but it’s dizzying. It makes you want to get up and flail around the room, or run away—but in a good way. Which doesn’t really make sense, but—it doesn’t have to make sense to anyone else. This is yours.

“Pan ones, fried ones, sweet potato ones, the little mini ones, the ones with all the vegetables in ‘em… so with this new kind that’s almost enough, huh.”

“I’ll still keep collecting them even after I get eight.”

“We could probably eat latkes every meal a day for the whole thing,” Asriel jokes. You draw out a stroke of the brush and you hear his toes scrape through the carpet as he flexes them. You swallow. “You could make a whole _menu.”_

“That might be fun,” you say, and set the brush aside so you can bury your face in his back and fuzzle him. He actually says _YIPE_ and wiggles left and right like a little dog to escape your cold fingers. It backfires: the way he rolls instead gives you a faceful of his stomach, where the fur is even softer. He makes a little high-pitched shriek that sounds almost like a bird cry and his locket thwaps the side of your head in a _clunk_ that’ll leave a mark for sure, you have Boss Monster fur up your nose, but you just laugh and laugh.

 

 

There’s so much that can be done with potatoes.

Because they’re a starchy food, they go with just about everything, and all kinds of different seasonings and styles of cooking work well on them. And different types of potato can be used to bring out different sides of different recipes: Purple sweet potato pie with Mettaton’s edible glitter for Asriel’s birthday. Cut-out red potato shapes, to make soups cuter. They’re a sure safe bet for Chara, who is otherwise a very picky eater—you haven’t yet managed to come up with any way to prepare potatoes that turns them into a texture Chara can’t stand. You think that potatoes are to them what rice is for you: Not necessarily their _favorite_ food but a comfort food.

There’s so much that can be done with latkes, too—really the only important guidelines are that they have potatoes in them and that they be fried. You’ve used your dad’s green gamjajeon recipe more than once. You’ve fried cabbage-heavy latkes on a flat grill and Chara only said once that this might as well be okonomiyaki but with potatoes—they still ate it, still sometimes request it.

Adding vegetables. Stripping the recipe down to its bare essentials. Deep-frying, or pan-frying, or frying in even less conventional ways. Different kinds of potatoes. Bringing along sour cream or applesauce, for an optional topping. There isn’t any sort of wrong answer.

Everyone has _favorites—_ Asriel likes the ones you make out of purple sweet potato, and Toriel likes the tiny ones you make from red potatoes and the ones that you fill with slaw veggies. Asgore likes the batter-heavy deep-fried variety, and there’s a couple of specific spice blends you use with pan latkes to make Chara happy. And Toriel won’t let you get a deep fryer at her house because she thinks deep frying is too unhealthy to do it often, but—nobody _dislikes_ any part of your repertoire. No one will complain, no matter what you carry out to share with them every night.

You still hold your breath just a little and wait for everyone else to take a bite sometimes, especially when you’re trying something new. Knowing that they won’t complain or scold in your head isn’t the same as being able to _trust_ that they won’t. It’s the same as bracing yourself in therapy, or flinching inside yourself whenever people raise their voices, or always wanting to go with Toriel on errands—being surprised when she returns home or comes to pick you up from Asgore’s right on time.

But potatoes are versatile. There are so many possibilities in one little tuber. Some choices are more _favorable_ under certain circumstances, but none of them are ever truly _incorrect._

It’s a very small thing, but it’s still _some_ thing.


End file.
